Apostolos will give the Dabis Lecture at Royal Holloway, 3 March 2011

Apostolos Doxiadis: ‘From Mimesis to Aristotle for Screenwriters-and back: What can a Modern Writer Learn from the Ancient Greeks about Writing?’

Modern writers see in Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides masters of narrative structure, while Hollywood screenwriting manuals pay tribute to Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet, this is chiefl y because we read the Greeks in ways which are biased by our own storytelling habits. By attempting to understand Greek literature in its original context, a writer can become much more aware of its differences from modern works – and learn much more from it.